Approaching Zero, Paul Mungo [good summer reads TXT] 📗

was Bob Jones, the chief programmer at

Queen Mary College. A tall, well-built man with beard and glasses and an

academic uniform that sometimes runs to jeans and Tshirts, he had been at the

college since 1968, first as a physics student, then staying on to work

full-time at the QMC computer center after earning his degree in 1971.

 

He worked out of a large office on the top floor of the computer science block,

a nondescript concrete shell of a building in east London. His office was near

the computer center, a cramped room packed with mainframes, some of them ICLs.

In the room’s center were eight consoles set up on adjoining desks, which allowed the activities of the mainframes to be monitored but were usually

unmanned, particularly at night.

 

Jones first realized that the QMC system had been breached by a hacker on

February 19, 1988. He had heard reports from colleagues at the Universities of

Glasgow and Hull that their own systems had been hacked by someone calling

himself Alan Dolby. What he saw on his computer was a series of files that had

been incorrectly stored in the memory, one of which had been labeled AD. He

began searching for signs of further tampering, and he soon found it: the four

OLAD user files Nick had created to give himself a smooth path into the QMC

computer. The files appeared to have been created a month previously.

 

Jones immediately reported the intrusion to his superior, Jeremy Brandon, the

director of the computer center, although it was clear that their options were

limited. They could attempt to lock their hacker out by closing all of the

OLAD files, but that might force the hacker to try more devious backdoor

methods to regain access. If he entered the system through such a method, they

might not be able to find him again—and he might do some real damage. Instead,

they decided to leave the files as they were and watch him, although they did

remove the Mad Hacker’s sysman status.

 

When Jones came into the office on the morning of March 30th, he found that

there had been no work processed on the computer since about two A.M., when

the scheduler (the program listing the priority of jobs) had failed. Its

failure coincided with a successful hack of the system made by OLAD028.

 

Jones and Brandon decided to record future intrusions on a

dedicated journal within the computer. They also decided to wipe out three of

the user-names, leaving only OLAD028, the one the hacker had consistently

employed. It would be easier to track him this way.

 

By this time the hacking incidents had been reported to QMC’s head of security,

who passed on the information to Scotland Yard’s Computer Crime Unit. Although

established in 1971, the CCU had until 1985 consisted of only one officer.

Then, as computer crime escalated and the government became concerned about the

vulnerability of its own systems, it was eventually enlarged to four officers—

still not a big force, given that Scotland Yard can be called in on cases

anywhere in Great Britain. The unit is headed by John Austen, who was the

officer assigned to investigate the Mad Hacker affair.

 

Austen knew that the only way to catch the hacker was to monitor the lines, the

same timeconsuming process used to track down Triludan the Warrior. That meant

involving British Telecom, which needed to assign an engineer to trace calls.

And because the Mad Hacker worked at night, that would involve overtime. For

the first few days the investigation was bogged down over the overtime

question: neither British Telecom nor QMC nor Scotland Yard were willing to

pay. Eventually the phone company gave in and set up a twenty-four-hour trace,

to be activated whenever the hacker was detected on the QMC system.

 

As the Mad Hacker gained confidence and experience, his activities took on a

new twist. To Bob Jones it seemed malicious, as if the hacker had declared war

on the system. One night the Mad Hacker ordered the QMC computer to print, I

THINK YOU SHOULD KNOW I AM MAD … I AM ALSO DEPRESSED, over and over. To

Hull University he sent a message saying, I AM TAKING UP THE CHALLENGE, then

loaded a “rabbit” onto the system. A rabbit is a piece of software that orders

a computer to perform useless tasks endlessly, multiplying ever more work

orders until they finally overwhelm the computer and it can cope with nothing

else. The Hull computer was down for ten hours after this particular rabbit

began breeding. THAT WILL FILL UP YOUR SODDING SYSTEM, another message said.

 

He then dropped a rabbit into the Glasgow computer. But this time, it didn’t

work. As he was on-line, the computer operator discovered him and sent him a

message demanding that he call the operations department. ALAN DOLBY DOESN T

MAKE CALLS, he wrote back.

 

Glasgow was where Dolby had first been rumbled, three months previously, when a

file he had created as a back door had been discovered. It was Glasgow that

had alerted the rest of the system operators on JANET that there was a hacker.

So there may have been an element of revenge when, one night, the Glasgow

system manager, Dr. Roger MacKenzie, tried to access the mainframe from his

home PC and found that he had been “locked out”—barred from his own computer.

It was later discovered that the Mad Hacker had captured sysman status that

night and instructed the mainframe to kick out MacKenzie.

 

At QMC an increasingly irritated Bob Jones was watching as intrusion after

intrusion was recorded in the computer journal. At first these were just

messages left for the sysman, schoolboyish nonsense such as WILL ET PLEASE

PHONE HOME and WILL NORMAN BATES PLEASE REPORT TO THE SHOWER ROOM. But then

things became more serious: the Mad Hacker instructed the QMC computer to

generate copies of reports from its memory, which prevented it from processing

necessary work, and on more than one occasion his intrusions caused the

computer to crash. It seemed as if the Mad Hacker had become vindictive and

malicious.

 

Once, he left a message asking, WHY DON’T YOU LOCK ME OUT? It was obvious to

Jones that his hacker wanted to play, but he ignored the messages.

 

Monitoring the lines was slowly getting results. When the Mad Hacker was

spotted making an unusual daytime appearance, Bob Jones called the

twenty-four-hour emergency number at British

Telecom—which rang and rang. In frustration he gave the receiver to someone

else to hold while he called a contact at British Telecom direct.

 

“There’s no one answering my emergency call,” he shouted.

 

“Well, yes,” the Telecom man said patiently. “The service doesn’t start until

five P.M.” As they spoke, an assistant passed him a note saying that the hacker

had left the system. Jones, still steaming, explained the precise meaning of

“twenty-four-hour service”.

 

The monitoring intensified. In early July the engineers at the telephone office

nearest QMC finally traced the hacker back to a telephone in Enfield. Another

monitor was placed on the suspect number to record all future activity.

 

On July 5th Jones came in to work to find that the computer journal recording

the Mad Hacker’s intrusions had been wiped out. That could only have happened

if the hacker had captured sysman status again. He also found this message:

 

THIS INSTALLATION HAS BEEN HACKED BY ALAN DOLBY.

 

ALAN DOLBY IS A REGISTERED MEMBER OF HACKING INC. (ICL DIVISION), WHICH IS A

SUBSIDIARY OF HACKING INTERNATIONAL.

 

THIS HACK IS (c) 1988 BY ALAN DOLBY (THE MAD HACKER).

 

The announcement was followed by a message for Marlyn, a computer operator

previously employed by QMC and mistakenly believed by the Mad Hacker to be the

sysman:

 

NOW MARLYN IS PROBABLY THINKING, !~��?$ (SH*T) HOW THE HELL DID HE GET IN THIS

TIME? … I BETTER HAVE A LOOK AT WHERE I KEEP HIS JOURNALS. OH SHIT, SHE

SAYS, THEY ARE NOT THERE ANYMORE. !~��?$

NOW, MARLYN, IT’S GETTING PRETTY BORING HAVING TO KEEP ON TEACHING YOU MANNERS.

 

I’D RATHER BE AT MY

 

OTHER SYSMAN HACK SITES. SO I HOPE YOU HAVE LEARNED (EXCEPT HOW I DID IT) FROM

THIS, MARLYN, AND REPLY TO MY MESSAGES; OTHERWISE YOU WILL MAKE ME VERY VERY

ANGRY, AND ROGER WILL TELL YOU ONE THING, YOU WON’T LIKE IT WHEN l’M ANGRY.

 

The reference was to the Mad Hacker’s successful lockout of Roger MacKenzie

from his own system. The message continued:

 

STILL, DON T GET TOO DESPONDENT MARLYN, I MEAN WHAT DID YOU EXPECT? IF I CAN

HACK ROGER S PLACE TWICE, THEN ANYTHING ELSE IS JUST A PIECE OF CAKE, AND I

MEAN YOU’RE NO GURU, MARLYN. ROGER IS THE GURU, HE WRITES PROGRAMS, HE DOESN T

PHONE UP SAYING, OH, ROGER, HELP ME, ROGER.

 

HAVE I WOUND YOU UP ENOUGH, MARLYN?

YOU WON’T BELIEVE HOW I GOT IN, MARLYN HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAAA

YOURS HACKINGLY, ALAN DOLBY … THE MAD HACKER!!!

THE MAD HACKER THE MAD HACKER ALAN DOLBY ALAN DOLBY …

 

Though the Mad Hacker had destroyed the journal when he hacked in to QMC that

night, he didn’t destroy the evidence. Like most computer users, QMC keeps

backup copies of files, so the record of the Mad Hacker’s intrusions still

existed. But it was becoming evident that eventually real damage to the system

could be caused if the hacking continued. It had already become very

frustrating to Jones, who was spending more and more time cleaning up after

the Mad Hacker and less time doing his real work. But even worse, Scotland Yard

had become concerned about hints that were contained in some of his computer

messages, that Alan Dolby was hacking into the Ministry of Defense computer,

also an ICL. The breakins might still be a game to the Mad Hacker, but

it was becoming deadly serious to everyone else.

 

They decided to go for a bust that very evening.

 

An arrest for computer hacking is not a straightforward affair. To make the

charge stick, the police would have to arrest the Mad Hacker while he was

actually in the middle of a hack, with the unauthorized dial-up on his computer

screen and his fingers on the keyboard. Evidence that the hacking had been

committed from his phone number was not sufficient: it could, after all, have

been done by his mother.

 

The team assembled for the bust was enormous. There were four policemen from

the Computer Crime Unit, two technical support specialists, two experts from

ICL, a police photographer, two British Telecom engineers, and a phalanx of

uniformed policemen. In addition Jones had to monitor the QMC computer to alert

the team when the Mad Hacker broke in. He was joined in his vigil by the

managers at other ICL sites on the JANET network, as well as by internal

British Telecom staff to monitor the phone lines. In total the team numbered

forty people.

 

As luck would have it, however, on that evening nothing happened; the Mad

Hacker simply went to bed early. But the next night, he decided to dial in to

QMC once more to see if anyone had replied to his message. According to the

computer record, he logged on at 7:48 P.M.

 

Just a few minutes before 8:00 P.M. the Whiteley family heard a knock on the

door. The police later described it as a gentle tap; to Nick, upstairs in his

bedroom, it sounded like loud banging. He thought it odd: why didn’t they use

the doorbell? Then he walked to his window and saw four men approaching the

door. He said later that he could tell from their appearance that they weren’t

Jehovah’s Witnesses, and for one awful second he thought they might be Mafia.

 

Downstairs Nick’s